Why can't NHL22 be on pc?

Ive seen the community mod keep merging to this thread: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Game-Information/Will-NHL-21-Come-Out-For-PC/td-p/8597139/

The reasons why its not coming out are actually so ridiculous... at one point the mod started talking about how its difficult to learn to skate and hockey equipment is expensive as a reason to say the world wide hockey fan base is smaller than american football. What????

I get that hes just a mod and doesn't have any input on these decisions as well as has to say whatever hes told even if he doesn't agree. But every excuse they make is so dumb.

As an experienced computer scientist making this game for PC wouldn't be hard. It's on the frostbite engine now which is modern and used for many other games that are built across PS, xbox and PC. So realistically what would need to be changed?:

- Maybe a new settings menu

- controls for kb+m (quite possibly difficult but honestly they could just say controllers are manditory)

- higher res textures and graphics

- maybe some networking things

- idk what else

everything else should be abstracted out by the frostbite engine as I would assume after making a whole new engine they would ideally try and reduce as much platform specific work needed to make games and rather just have that handled by the engine. So assuming the current codebase isnt a mess this would be just as much work as it took to convert madden to pc. Honestly would be doable by maybe 5 experienced engineers in half a year so maybe 500k ish salary (neglecting bug checking and testing). Honestly I think it could be done in less as it really shouldnt be much work. But this is a one time cost, once the game has been adapted to PC it is now just updating and maintenance (most of which should be platform agnostic). So really even if we say american football has 5x the fans the roi of doing this conversion would just be 5x slower which sure isn't great but I don't see EA quitting making these sports games any time soon and lets be honest EA isnt hurting for money.

In summary the conversion would be a relatively cheap cost in both terms of time and money.

I've personally started many threads and petitions for NHL on PC each getting tons of people supporting and thats only the hardcore people who would be searching for that kind of stuff, and I keep seeing others doing the same every year when I check back. When will they ackownledge these fans in a respectful manner instead of giving nonsense excuses.

The excuses given by the community mod are nonsense and honestly laughable. Here are some of the recent ones:

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Football fans very heavily outweigh hockey fans. Yes, hockey is a worldwide sport, but it's also mainly popular in cold weather regions. There's also a very big barrier to entry as you need a lot of expensive gear. Not to mention, learning how to ice skate. I wish this sport was as popular as many seem to think. It's the greatest sport in the world to those of us that are passionate fans of it, but there just isn't a big enough PC hockey crowd to support it. If there were, you'd probably have seen one released by now by one of the many gaming companies out there.

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I mean come on... what are you talking about? Just because someone doesn't know how to skate or doesnt play due to cost of equiptment has no correlation with how many people watch/enjoy hockey. Also the point of if there was more support we would have seen some other gaming company do it?? Are you joking? Someone going to compete with EA for a hockey game? That really has nothing to do with it being on PC but rather no company has the time and money to create a game that would be able to compete with EA's NHL thats been worked on for what almost 30 years? It would have to be better in every way and also somehow convert all the current console players over to their game. So no, low pc demand isnt the reasons other gaming companies havnt made it...

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None of this has anything to do with the game not releasing on PC. As has been said multiple times, we would love to have NHL available to PC players. It looks like there's the possibility of that happening through cloud gaming. It's not impossible that a true PC version will be released someday, but so far, research hasn't proven there would be a big enough audience for it. Even when people create petitions, they only get several thousand responses. We also aren't getting an overwhelming amount of requests for a PC version. There is no big conspiracy for why we don't have one yet. There just isn't a big enough playerbase to make all the work that goes into porting the game to PC as well as supporting it worth all the time and resources required to make that happen.

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As I explained earlier the work really isnt that hard. Supporting it over time sure, but realistically if not many players play then just have less/lower powered servers. Better yet do what every other company has been doing of recently (including EA with Apex) and just make the game crossplatform and just have one pool of servers (of which the PC players shouldnt have a big impact and therefore shouldnt be a big deal). Once again EA is not low on money (makes billions in revenue each quarter) the cost of porting is relatively not that much to satisfy a big group of fans who continually ask for the same thing for probably 10 years now. Just do it and get it over with, as I said once the initial conversion is done the maintenance should be relatively small and easy so this is likely a move that maybe doesnt return its investment in one year, but in the long run will bring in profit and had EA done this years ago theyd already be making their profit.

At the very least could we have a little something to strive for. Say we get a petition going could we atleast get some consideration if we hit some goal, 100k, 500k, 1m. Just something we can work towards that isn't just this starting from scratch each year I check back. I feel like there is so much conversation on this and if it was just compiled into one source that is measurable and people can actually feel it is going towards something if its signed (if we are given a goal by a mod). Maybe a mod could even start the petition so we have one central one to use.